Thomas Hardy
Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we would.Collection: Society
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.Collection: Alone
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.Collection: War
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.Collection: Art
Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.Collection: Time
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.Collection: Patience
The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.Collection: Men
Some folk want their luck buttered.Collection: Chance
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.Collection: Family
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.Collection: Hope
Fear is the mother of foresight.Collection: Fear
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.Collection: Men
You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them.Collection: Funny
The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.Collection: Religion
There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
And yet to every bad there is a worse.
Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
If way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.
A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
That man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
No one can read with profit that which he cannot learn to read with pleasure.
There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.
Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening.Collection: Women
Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.Collection: Pain
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.Collection: Heart
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.Collection: Novelists
If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.Collection: Acceptance
The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.Collection: Heart
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.Collection: Tess Of The D Urbervilles
Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?Collection: Distance
People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.Collection: People
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.Collection: Love Is
War makes good history but peace is poor reading.Collection: Peace
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.Collection: Voice
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.Collection: Experience
Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.Collection: Silence
I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.Collection: Love You